The Bakken -- A Reminder -- Running The Numbers -- February 21, 2021

Running the numbers. 

The Bakken holds 500 billion bbls of OOIP. Ten percent is definitely recoverable. Harold Hamm once suggested the Bakken held upwards of one trillion bbls of OOIP but then backed off. The "500" number comes from a paper written years ago, never vetted, never published. With new data, one does wonder if 500 is off by half. 

Early in the boom, it was expected that 1 - 3% of OOIP would be recovered/produced through primary production. It didn't take long for Whiting to show that 10% was easily achievable, and now there are estimates that percent recoverable through primary production could be much, much higher. But let's stick with the conservative numbers.

• OOIP: 500 billion bbls
• primary production, 10%: 50 billion bbls
• Bakken production: one million bbls / day = 365 million bbls/year
• do the math: (50 billion bbls ) / (365 million bbls/year) = 50,000 / 365 = 140 years of drilling and CBR
  

Now let's assume primary production is 20% and let's assume OOIP remains the same. Let's assume that production drops to an average of 250 million bbls/year for various reasons (Biden policies; EVs; pipelines shut down, etc):

• 500 billion x 0.2 = 100 billion bbls
• 100 billion bbls / (250 million bbls/years) = 400 years and CBR
  

The law of big numbers.